Many corporations and other organizations use report generating systems. Large organizations typically use multiple report servers by which reports are generated from various data sources and served to networked clients.
According to a standard concept within the realm of current network management, network traffic is routed based on consideration of user, cost, time of day, and/or performance considerations. Some existing reporting systems route requests among the multiple report servers based on such a standard concept, but they do not allow users to control routing of requests.
Organizations often want to designate certain requests to be served by a particular subset of the report servers. For example, each department within an enterprise is responsible for acquiring, maintaining, and managing its own servers, and the department prefers that these servers are used primarily by members of the department. Also, an organization may have a mixed environment with servers running different operating systems, on different hardware, and servers of a certain type are configured to access and generate reports against specific databases. A server type can connect only to its specific, associated databases, and has no connectivity to the databases used by the other server types. In such a case, reports authored for specific databases need to be routed to the corresponding server type.
It is therefore desirable to provide a mechanism that allows users to control where and how requests are routed.